Sheep Guarding Llama

Today, for Liesl’s school science project, she is making home made butter!  This actually came up in her curriculum some time ago but our local corner store has nothing even remotely like cream so we have been unable to start the project at all.  Liesl reminds us every day or two that we need to go to a store that has it because she is anxious to make butter at home.  Yesterday, when we made the run out to the grocery store in the next town, we were able to get the cream that we needed so today is the day.  Thank goodness for those days when the kid is excited about doing school.  What a blessing that is.

This was quite a project and really wore out Liesl (and Dominica.)  The did a full litre of cream which required splitting it into multiple bottles to shake and boy does it take a lot of shaking to get it to work.  This took up much of the morning.  But it worked and at the end of it all we had rather a good chunk of butter to put into the fridge and it tasted great.  It was very good butter.  I’m not saying that this is a worthy process and that we should be making our own butter on a regular basis, but it was effective and as a family that goes through butter with reckless abandon it will not be wasted on us!

I did an ownCloud 9 installation project today.  It just released this morning so it was a good day to work on getting it installed and writing up my experience with it.

It turned out to be a busy day of arguing about technical issues with ownCloud to a point where their engineer had to be pulled off of the forums and a call with their management scheduled for tomorrow to talk about the things that were said, the claims made, etc.  A rough day for them that should have been an exciting release day.

Tonight, once things settled down, I got some time to game with the girls.  We played some more of Final Fantasy III or, as the girls call it, “Luneth”.  We played that for a little while but then switched over to a hidden object game Fairytale Mysteries 2: The Beanstalk which both girls did a great job playing.  They have really developed the skills for the hidden object games.

Tonight Dominica and I spent a lot of time talking about our fall plans.  We are all over the map (more literally than that expression normally implies) in what we are thinking that we want to do this fall.  We have kicked around returning to Romania, Sicily, Piemonte, the Sud Tirol, Trieste and more.  We are having a really hard time narrowing down where we want to be and even what our goal for this cycle is going to be.

First thing this morning I woke up to the sound of the voice of the owner of the house.  He was over with the fuel oil company getting the tank refilled at the house and measuring the fuel levels, checking on things, etc.  Turns out that he is flying to France tomorrow to pick up a sail boat and will be sailing back from northern France to Crete for the rest of the time that we are here and won’t return to Crete until weeks after we have left to go on to Romania.  So this is literally his last day to check in on us.

This ended up filling out morning.  We did a bunch of cleaning since people were in the house, that needed to be done anyway so kind of worked out.  I took out loads of trash, walking them down town.  I had to spend a lot of time with the owner figuring out the fuel oil situation.  Our oil usage, which was almost entirely in January, came to well over six hundred dollars, which is crazy.  Fuel oil is insanely expensive in Greece due to the economic hardships hitting the country.  One of the many things that is currently crippling them.

Once he was done at the house, we ran out as a family to do grocery shopping and to get cash.  We need to max out two cash withdrawls to be able to cover the fuel oil costs so we got our maximum for today and plan to get the rest tomorrow.  So that ate up all of our morning and early afternoon, it was an incredibly busy day without us having planned for it to be at all.

Once we were done with all of that it was back to the house and I was busy posting and writing for the rest of the day.  No real time to hang out with the family.

Monday morning.  Got up in the late morning.  Not sore at all after having slept on the floor again last night.

Had a mostly busy writing and posting day.  Got a bit done.

Dominica came with me to the corner store this morning.  Getting her to shop with me twice a month is a victory. Considering that I often go more than once a day, it is surprising how seldom she will accompany me.

Dominica made a bowl of egg salad today, it went perfectly with some amazing local bread that we found at the store this morning.

Luciana got up and talked me into doing a little racing with her today.  We have now earned all of the race courses and a few extra songs and racers in Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing.

We forgot to get olive oil while at the store earlier today so I returned to the corner store later in the afternoon to pick that up so that Dominica could fry up dinner later.

Tonight Dominica made calamari for Luciana again like she did last night.  Luciana says that this is the best calamari that she has ever had.  Maybe that is because it has been months since she has had any, but it was quite good.  Dominica fries it in a pan on the range.

We watched a few shows on travelling in Romania while we ate dinner this evening.  Hard to believe that we will be on our way north to Romania is just three weeks!  Dominica has spent a lot of today working on travel arrangements and we bought our flights on AegeanAir for getting up from Athens to Bucharest today.  We are going to take the overnight ferry from Chania to Athens to catch the flights there.  We are getting a four bed berth on the ferry, which should be really cool.

The girls talked me into playing a video game with them late this evening.  It took a bit to pick one out.  We started with one of the Mystery PI hidden object games but those have no story and while they enjoy the hidden object puzzles they do not like ones that are timed.  Even though we had lots of time they felt that it was too stressful to have a time limit and wanted to play something else.

We settled on the Fairytale Mysteries 2: The Beanstalk which we just bought about a week ago.  Liesl has been looking forward to playing this one.  We got in a good hour, at least, and more likely two or three.  We all snuggled as we do, while Dominica read in the living room, and did our best for the girls to take turns controlling the game.  I just sit and watch, I never really get to play although there isn’t much to do in this style of game.  Luciana always gets frustrated trying to control the game but doesn’t want to be left out as Liesl controls it.

We had a nice time and got the girls shuffled off to bed at two thirty, although both of them were awake until four thirty, at least.  Dominica banished them to their own room tonight.  So they were up in bed watching videos all night since the wireless works in that room (but not in ours.)

I had meant to go to bed with everyone else but ended up getting some work done and catching up on SGL and updating some NodeBB code and more until nearly five in the morning.  I was very productive.

It is Sunday and today we got Dominica to join us for a second day of video game marathons!

Dominica and I hung out together for a bit this morning.  Then, after we had finished up our coffee and had a quiet morning we fired up Dear Esther and did a straight play through of it.  I did all of the game play and she just watched.  Actually she just listened.  After about five minutes of the game she was acutely aware that the first person perspective of the game made her not feel well to her stomach and so she had to just listen and when we came upon a new scene I would stop moving and tell her to look while it was motionless.

I really liked Dear Esther as an experiment in story telling and literature.  It is an amazing work of art and well worth experiencing.  So sad, but incredibly well done.  We are very glad that we took the time to go through it again. The girls joined us too to nearly the entire thing, so the four of us were all camped out on the bed together.  It prompted good discussions about loss, sadness, suicide, etc.  A very tough game, indeed.  There is no doubt why it is considered so seminal.

We finished up Robin’s Quest today.  All four of us played it together.  That’s a great game, one of my favourite hidden object games ever as it doesn’t deal with anything creepy, nothing dead or undead, no occult, no adult themes… none of the things that so often plague hidden object games. It’s a totally “normal” adventure game taking place in England.  It’s goofy and shallow and the title character has been, true to hidden object form, turned into a woman but besides that the themes and topics and gameplay are one hundred percent family friendly and great for kids.  The girls were even introduced to scrolls and sun dials from the game.  So after another hour or two on this one we managed to wrap up yet another full game this weekend!  That’s at least three, already!

Next up was Bookworm Adventures which Dominica and I played for just a little while.  It’s good and we are making good progress on book two but I was just not into it that much, today.

Next up was Puzzle Agent which is pretty awesome.  It is made by Telltale Games, from whom we have loved pretty much everything that we have tried.  This one really makes us feel like we are playing a 1960s cartoon (like Rocky and Bullwinkle) but filled with puzzles.  The story is ridiculous and totally entertaining.  The puzzles are mostly good but do suffer from ambiguity and I’m pretty sure accuracy problems that make them not nearly as good as they could be if they were more polished.  The same kinds of issues that my dad found with many of the puzzles in the Blue Toad Murder Files.  But we had a good time and we can tell that this game is going to be a winner.

The girls had enough of video games and did a bit of playing on their own in the living room this evening.  They would come in from time to time to check on us.

Our final game for the night was Dominica and I playing Lost Horizons which is an adventure mystery game with strong Indiana Jones overtones (including era, themeing, location, flying map style, and more.) where you play a pilot from Hong Kong (cough… Temple of Doom) who has to fly in an old junker to Tibet (cough… Raiders) with the daughter of his old partner (cough… Raiders) to stop the Nazis (cough… Raiders) from getting some ancient artefact and take over the world in 1936.  The game is incredibly polished and has a little feel of Casablanca about it as well.  We only played a little bit, but what we have seen is excellent and a lot of fun.  I am really looking forward to getting some time to really get into this game.  The characters, story and locations are very fun and I can see why people clamoured so much for a sequel (which we also have in our library.)

The girls insisted in sleeping in the bed again tonight, so I am on the floor yet again.  We were all in bed rather early, though, for us, which was good.  Before falling asleep, Liesl climbed down onto the floor with me, she was very sad that I was sleeping alone.  She fell asleep seconds after snuggling with me on the floor with her head on my arm.  So while I had no space, was unable to move and was sleeping on a hard floor, at least I had snuggles.

I got up this morning and was awake before anyone else.  I opened up the house and went into the game room and made an attempt at playing Dear Esther which I have been wanting to play for some time.  I had tried it out and done maybe half of the first chapter some time ago, just to see how the game was.  This was my first time with time to actually attempt playing it.

I got about an hour in when Liesl and Luciana woke up and came into the game room to join me.  They watched me play for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes and really enjoyed the “game” even thought there is no game, just a walking simulator as I walk around a Scottish island.  They felt that the graphics were so nice that it would be fun.

Both girls really wanted to get back to playing Final Fantasy III today so they talked me out of stopping Dear Esther about a quarter of the way through the final chapter. So I stopped playing so that we could switch and discovered that we were minutes away from completing Dear Esther and that none of it had saved and that I was going to have to play the entire game, again, from the beginning now.  Impatience rears its ugly head once again.  That was a lot of wasted time.

We got back into Final Fantasy III and this was our day.  Nearly all of it.  We played for almost ten hours!  Liesl stayed with me for the entire day.  Luciana put in a solid two hours, probably, at the beginning and then came in and out throughout the day to keep up with what was going on but not watching the game continuously.

We made really good progress and made it through the first two large sections of the game.  Liesl was really into it and had a great time.  She really followed the story and did a great job at understanding all of the battle mechanics.  I think that we are going to have a good time playing the Final Fantasy series together.  We own so many of them.  At this point on Steam we own three, four, four part two, five, six, seven, eight, we are waiting on nine to release which is due very soon, and the three parts of thirteen.  Eleven and fourteen are not real games so they can be ignored.  The only ones that we don’t own are one, two, ten, ten part two and twelve – none of which is yet available on the PC.  My guess is that one and two at the very least will be remade and rereleased very soon as next year is the thirtieth anniversary of the series and with nine coming soon, fifteen due to be made soon and the anniversary coming up this is a huge opportunity for them to get a lot of sales in.  It would be a huge lost opportunity if they didn’t get the last five titles done for the PC.  The first two are just “old” and need to get released.  The ten and twelve series are from the Playstation 2 (and we own them on that) and likely need tons of work to make them viable on the PC.  Likely they have to completely reword the graphics, engine and more to get them ready for release and they are anything but small games so doing so is likely an insane amount of work.  But I can only imagine that they would sell like crazy, too.  If they don’t release them on the PC they have nowhere at all to sell them with the PS2 long off of the market now.  They need to release them or the opportunity is simply lost.

After ten hours on FF3 neither Liesl nor I was prepared to take much more.  We beat the big salamander boss and shut it down moving on to Supreme League of Patriots that the girls and I have been playing.  We did not have too much left to do on that before wrapping up episode one.  So that is another game wrapped up and completed!  The girls liked that one all of the way through.  They miss a lot of the humour as it is a weird mix of super heroes and political humour.

We played a little bit of Puzzler World, too.  Not a lot, just eight puzzles or so.  Ciana did the fitwords, Liesl did the sudoku and link-a-pix.  That game is huge so a little here and there is a good way to tackle it.  We always save the few game types that Dominica enjoys just in case she ever decides that she is going to join us.

For our final game of the night we moved on to Robin’s Quest which is a Robin Hood themed hidden object game, one that I had gotten to test out when we were still living in Texas and is one of the first couple hidden object games that I ever tried out, but only played for less than twenty minutes so had never actually gotten into.  Both girls really enjoyed this one and we easily put in two hours playing it.

Liesl does an awesome job of controller the main game.  Like other games she learns her way around so quickly and can navigate the whole game without any problem and she is pretty good at nearly all of the puzzles.  Luciana is really good at the hidden object portions and likes to control those.  So we play as a team effort.  It works great.

So my day was spent on the right hand side bed in the game room with my daughters snuggling with me all day.  It was an awesome day.  We played tons of stuff and had a great time spending time together.  This is just about a perfect day.  We all had a lot of fun.  And Dominica got to spend the day on her own in the living room reading a book which is what she wanted.  I don’t think that she even came into the gaming room all day.

Tonight Luciana decided that she really wanted to sleep in the bed with Dominica and Liesl so I got kicked out and had to sleep on the floor beside the bed.